AGCI research programme: Environmental Economics and Responses to Climate Change

AGCI postdoc: Tatiana Kiseleva

Economics of natural resilience to global change

This research project aims to explore the extent to which the output of various systems (ecosystems, wild species populations, etc.) are perceived as substitutes or complements to man-made consumption goods, in order to derive a “social demand function” for resilience of the system under consideration. The research will consist of both theoretical as well as empirical work (including stated and revealed preference techniques focusing on risk and uncertainty and precautionary principles) at different scales, as system outputs and man-made goods are expected to be closer substitutes at a lower scale of analysis. Desertification is an example of people continuing to convert forest land into agricultural land, because of the fact that even though they are dependent on the forest for their survival, their discount rates and the lack of good substitutes for agricultural production induce them to continue overexploiting forest soils. At the scale of the Earth’s climate system, man-made outputs are complements to the state of the climate, suggesting that the costs of climate change are very high – but that also means that upon a system flip, system restoration may be prohibitively expensive. Hence, the demand for resilience is likely to be larger for more severe environmental problems.

Short CV

Tatiana Kiseleva is a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Global Change Institute (AGCI). She holds a Master degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Volgograd State University, Russia (2004) and a Master degree in Dynamical Systems from Utrecht University (2006). Tatiana has obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Amsterdam (2011). In her doctoral thesis she developed a theory and methods to study parameterized dynamic optimization problems with multiple equilibria. Furthermore she applied the new techniques to study a model of optimal control of water pollution.

Academic training

2011

PhD in Economics, Department of Computational Economics, University of Asmterdam

2006

MSc in Dynamical Systems, Department of Mathematics, Utrecht University